“Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival
(July 8)
Presented under the open-air tent at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s Garrison location, Anne Washburn’s “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” concerns “a not-so-distant future where the grid has failed, society has crumbled, and memories can no longer be stored on hard drives, a group of survivors come together to recreate their vanished world through the life-affirming act of telling stories under the stars.” Also booked: “Romeo & Juliet” (July 7-September 18) and “Where We Belong” (August 13-22).
Powerhouse Theater Summer Season
(June 26-July 30)
Powerhouse Theater, on the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie—the celebrated incubator of Broadway’s Tony-winning “Hamilton,” “Bright Star,” and “The Humans”—has lined up yet another scintillating summer season. Commencing with a reading of “aNNA,” based on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (June 26), the calendar continues with a reading of “Final Boarding Call” (July 2) and productions of “Luna and the Star Bodies” (July 8-9), “Things to Do When No One Can See You” (July 7, 14, 21, 28), “The Tempest” (July 15-17), “The Trojan Women” (July 22-24), “NYC: 1975” (July 24-25), and “Shakespeare: Unplugged” (July 29-31) and wraps up with the New Works Play Festival (July 30). A residency by the New York Stage and Film company includes “The World is Not Silent” (July 15-17), “Sweet Chariot” (July 22-24), and “Tell Them I’m Still Young” (July 28-30).
“Grounded” at Denizen Theater
(June 9-July 10)
New Paltz’s black box theater at the Water Street Market has a new creative team at the helm. International theater veterans Andy and Kirsty Gaukel launch the 2022 season with George Brandt’s “Grounded,” a tale based on the current workings of the US military. An unexpected pregnancy ends an ace fighter pilot’s career in the sky. Reassigned to operate military drones from a windowless trailer outside Las Vegas, she hunts terrorists by day and returns home each night. As the pressure to track a high-profile target mounts, the boundaries begin to blur between the desert in which she lives and the one she patrols half a world away. Denizen’s staging of the one-man show stars Emmy Award-winning poet, writer, actor, and activist Suzen Baraka. As a black and Korean actress, Baraka says she took the role partly because “ideas around surveillance and being watched are huge in my community so I thought it would be interesting to explore it.”
New York Stage and Film Workshops at Marist College
(July 9-August 7)
Vital theatrical development company New York Stage and Film has expanded its program this year to Poughkeepsie’s Marist College, where it’s set to hold a trio of musical workshops as well as two weekends of open readings. The workshops include “The Return of Young Boy” (July 23-24), “The Potluck” (July 29-30), and “Sun Songs” (August 5-7). Weekend number one of the readings has “My Brother is Better at Love Than Me” (July 9), “Nuestro Planeta: Colombia Project” (July 9), and an untitled work by Josh Radnor (July 9). The second reading weekend features “Modern Gentleman” (August 6), “Demons” (August 6), and “Love All” (August 7).
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“Public Speaking 101” at Great Barrington Public Theater
(June 14-24)
Great Barrington Public Theater company presents productions at the Daniels Art Center of Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. This month in the center’s McConnell Theater is local playwright Mark St. Germain’s (“Eleanor,” “DAD”) new comedy “Public Speaking 101,” which follows “a neurotic amateur actress [who] leads her community theater class of terrified adults to compete in their county’s first annual public speaking competition.” Also playing: “Grief, the Musical…a Comedy” (June 3-12), “The Bard That Beat the Blues” (June 8-26), “The Shot” (June 16-19), “Leave Your Fears Here” starring James Morrison (June 30-July 10), and “Things I Know to Be True” (August 4-14).
Moliere’s “Dom Juan” at Bard SummerScape
(June 23-July 16)
One of Bard College’s many intriguing SummerScape events during its 19th season is director Ashley Tata’s (“Mad Forest”) adaptation of Moliere’s classic “Dom Juan.” Presented at the Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater, Tata’s version subverts this already subversive comedy by casting female actors in the roles of Dom Juan (Amelia Workman) and, in this case, her sidekick, Sganarelle (Zuzanna Szadowski) and “sets the story in a fantasy world where 17th-century France meets late-1970s America.” Another SummerScape 2022 pick is Richard Strauss’s comic opera “The Silent Woman (Die Schweigsame Frau)” with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein (July 22-31).
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Catskill Mountain Shakespeare
(July 16-31)
One of the Bard’s best-loved comedies gets an outdoor staging befitting its forested setting with this tented production by the Catskill Mountain Shakespeare troupe at the Emerson Resort and Spa in Phoenicia. Directed by Peter Andersen, the show’s riotous run will be previewed with a special pay-what-you-can performance on July 15 and includes both matinee and evening performances; for new parents, the schedule even includes several “relaxed” matinees with childcare provided.
“Invasion!” at the Ancram Opera House
(August 5-21)
Built in 1927 as a Grange hall for the Columbia County farm town of Ancram, the Ancram Opera House provides a beatific setting for a performing arts venue. Top among its offerings this summer is Swedish novelist and playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s satirical comedy “Invasion!,” whose main character, Abulkasem, is either “an uncle visiting from Lebanon, a renowned theater director, an asylum-seeking apple picker, [or] the world’s most dangerous terrorist.” Grab your tickets for this uproarious story and find out.
“Shelley’s Shadow” at the Bridge Street Theater
(September 8-18)
Brad Fraser’s “Shelley Shadow” is the first-ever new play commission for Catskill’s Bridge Street Theater. “Out of work, out of money, and out of ideas, David, a writer in his 60s, gives up his condo and moves into a run-down high-rise apartment building in downtown Toronto,” says the synopsis. “There, his life becomes inexorably entangled in that of his upstairs neighbor Shelley—a gregarious lesbian in her 80s with encroaching Alzheimer’s-related dementia—and her long-time canine companion, Shadow.” This month has the East Coast premiere of Eric Pfeffinger’s “Fourteen Funerals” (June 2-12).
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This article appears in June 2022.
BANNERMAN HAS A VERY EXCITING SEASON OF PERFORMANCES THIS SUMMER. CK IT OUT!